About the Editor

Roberto has over 25 years experience in the IT field, and has spent the last 12 years working in the intersection of open source software and business development. Roberto has taken an active interest in different open source projects and organizations, he has served on advisory boards, and helped large IT vendors, open source vendors and customers to design and deploy their open source strategies. After serving as Senior Director of Business Development at SourceForge for over 4 years, in 2016 he started a new company called Business Follows, whose mission is to is to help developers, companies and organizations to make Open Source development a key part of their business strategies. He is the editor of commercial open source blog.

My ignite talk was around on one of the most important value of open source, if not the only one that makes open source a “different thing”: the community. Having had the opportunity to share my thoughts with over 100 attendees in a bare 5 minutes talk, I want here to talk deeper about why the community matters, focusing on its different constituents and their relative interests.

I think putting Free Software-only extensions in their own repository makes perfect sense. While I don’t completely agree with The Free Software Foundation’s position that proprietary software is evil, there is a practical matter to consider. As it stands, it is becoming more and more difficult for end-users to distinguish between Free Software and various forms of “freeware” that isn’t open source and in many cases has serious usage restrictions. In order for the Free Software / Open Source movement to make any serious impact long term, it must solidify the benefits with consumers appropriately. This can only be done if the distinction between truly Free software and simply “free as in beer” software becomes more mainstream. The most straightforward and simple way of doing this is by keeping them apart — that way a person can tell at a glance what rights they have when they install an extension, rather than having to research it first (which they almost certainly won’t bother to do, in most cases).

Case Studies: Deploying Open Source Storage Clouds – When you sort
through the hype of cloud storage it is possible to find real world practical examples in use today. In this webinar a panel of experts will discuss:
• Key storage trends and the importance of open source storage
• The value of scalable storage, why it matters and what you should look for
• Discussion on cloud storage, is it real and what are the practical use cases
Wed, May 26, 2010 02:00 PM ET – 03:00 PM ET (More …)

Black Duck today released the results of a survey asking 20 developer executives from 14 global enterprises about the top technology trends and about barriers to greater use of open source software in development projects. The 2010 edition of the “future of open source” published a survey reporting feedback from 551 respondents (48% vendors, 52% non vendors), giving feedback about what makes open source attractive and top 3 barriers to open source adoption.